Transfer of Training on Location of a Fault: Effects of Trainer's Observation, Prompting, and Achievement Level

Abstract

Four training conditions were investigated with human Ss differentiated according to high achievement and low achievement academic histories. Trainer's presence or absence was paired with conditions of trial and error and prompting in a complete factorial. It was hypothesized based on a Hull-Spence interpretation of social facilitation that trainer's presence with prompting during training would lead to superior transfer over conditions of trainer's absence and prompting, while the lowest transfer was expected with the combined condition of trainer's presence and trial and error. It was further assumed that high achievers would learn the task readily and be relatively unaffected by the four training conditions. On the transfer task for both fault-misses and response time trial and error for the low achievers was superior to prompting. Trainer's presence was insignificant, while achievement level was influential. The results suggested that active learning involving the task-activity of trial and error was more arousing than the social factor of the trainer's presence, particularly in view of the fact that the trainer lacked significant evaluative ability for the trainee- Ss in the laboratory setting.